On Sunday 13 July 2008, Chris Newport wrote:An underlying issue here is that the soc.c and socal.c drivers are not maintained and have not worked since 2.2.x This means that the disk packs ( 3 drawers of 10 disks each ) usually found on these machines will not work.In that case I would say that the request to have them included in D-I was not correct and that we should remove them again. If I see no objections to that over the next few days, I will make that change.http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-sparc@lists.debian.org/msg20892.htmlsays socal works from vanilla sources, if the poster was building a kernel current at the time of his post then he can confirm they do work and should stay.
1) The original poster needed the soc.c (Sun FC/25) driver which definitely has not worked since 2.2.x 2) soc.c and socal.c (Sun FC/100) are both unmaintained 3) The above msg20892.html does not specify which kernel version worked with socal.c, the poster only says "when I hand built kernels"
4) This mess has been discussed several times on the sparclinux list Is there any evidence that socal.c has worked with modern kernels ?.